The Lady Killer

EPILOGUE

As I take up my pen, I feel rather strange. I remember the young journalist from the woman’s magazine who used to come every day after my husband’s arrest to ask me to write an article or give her an interview. My old maid never let her past the gate, but still she came every day for nearly three months.

But one day she stopped coming.

Oh well, an enthusiast like her probably got married or something!

Since she stopped calling at our gate every day, I won’t say that I didn’t become lonely, but nonetheless I must admit to being somewhat relieved. You see, I still had some unfinished business in Tokyo, and I wanted to be able to get away…

When the news of my husband’s arrest reached me, I was painting in my atelier.

The basic color of the painting was red.

What would my Chicago analyst, Dr. John Wells, have said if he could have seen it?

He’d have put it down to my repressed sexual urges again, I imagine.

It was the local policeman who came to inform me. He had a search warrant to go through my husband’s belongings. But he was quite perfunctory about it.

Maybe it was out of respect for my father. Or else they already had more than enough evidence to secure a conviction. Anyway, they didn’t disturb us too much.

It was the local police chief who looked into my atelier. He was very reserved about it and didn’t even notice the half-full bottle of chloroform that was in amongst my paints and turpentine. I wasn’t even trying to hide it—why bother? Their attitude toward me was one of sympathy mixed with curiosity…

They took it for granted that I was distraught at the discovery that my husband was a murderer with perverse tastes. That suited me very well; I hardly had to act at all; all I had to do was lie on my bed pretending to be a woman struck speechless by shock.

After all, that’s the way the relatives of criminals are, isn’t it? The worse the crime, the more they try to bury themselves away from ordinary human society. That suited me very well.

My worst fear was the press. What if they took my photograph? But, perhaps out of sympathy for me as the innocent victim of my husband’s crimes, they were tasteful enough to leave me alone. Some of the gutter-press tried to get my photo, but I foiled them by staying indoors. So the only photos that were published were of me when I was twenty and striking dramatic poses during my short career as an actress, or else of me as a high school girl wearing a sailor suit, my hair in pigtails. So that was all right—no way in which I could be recognized.

My next worry was that I might be summoned to the court to appear as a witness. I decided to lose enough weight to change my appearance during the few months leading up to the trial. I started to starve myself; after a few weeks, I caught sight of my legs and was stunned. What lovely legs I used to have! All tanned and well shaped, with firm muscles, just like the legs of an antelope. How proud I had been of them! I always used to wear the shortest possible skirts when playing tennis, just to show them off. I used to let my skirts ride up, letting men see how brown my thighs were, right up to the briefest of pants, which I always wore. And underneath, right down to where the pants ended—Oh, if they could have seen how white were the secret places of my body!

But now they were like the colorless bones of a skeleton. I pulled my negligee up; the color was the same on both my legs and my private parts. They looked like the legs of a Jew in a concentration camp.

I took off the negligee and looked at myself naked; I really was becoming like a skeleton with only a few wisps of hair in the middle!

But it was affecting my health; I was taking purgatives to get my weight down and soon became too feeble even to open my mouth to issue instructions to the housekeeper. I even lacked the strength to pick up the blanket when it slipped off the bed. I was smoking heavily to repress my appetite; my right hand became a nicotine-stained claw. Having no strength, I would frequently drop my cigarette and set my bedding asmolder. The housekeeper scolded me on such occasions, but what could I do?

If I did start a fire, the atelier would be razed to its foundations, and then that would lead to my ruin… But I had to keep on smoking.

I dreaded that the housekeeper would stop getting me my cigarettes. I needed the smoke of those hot, dry leaves with their pungent smell and billowing, purple-colored smoke; I needed them to help the loneliness, terror, and obsessions of my lonely bed.

For a time I fasted on no more than a little thin gruel, but I needed more substance to make the cigarettes taste good, so I would occasionally take a little breast of chicken fried in a good-quality oil or else eat a quarter of a sugar-sprinkled doughnut.

Eventually, I couldn’t hold on to anything. I dropped everything I touched—a water jug, an ashtray full of butts, even the expensive antique German fountain pen that I had bought in Chicago.

But I couldn’t give up the cigarettes.

I always kept a big tin of Westminster by my bed, but it soon got empty. The old housekeeper used to complain about the smoke-filled atmosphere and open the windows. One cold February night, she didn’t close them properly, and the draft was freezing me, so I got up and tried to shut them. But I just didn’t have the strength.

That was when I was weakest, I think.

In those days, I was not bothered by visits from the dead. No, it was sex that dominated my mind: his sex, and my sex.

What dreams do men have who have been soldiers and who have killed? What do they think, falling asleep alone at night, of those whom they overcame after struggling hand to hand? Or those ancient warriors, naked between the sheets, dreaming of their youth and well-oiled nakedness, the bulging muscles of youth, the struggles… now all gone. What did they think of in bed?

I thought of the touch of his naked body, drenched with the sweat of the women that he had mounted…

I thought of myself, naked and giving myself to men to collect the evidence I needed. My palms still seemed to feel the flesh of those men to whom I had submitted…

Well, at any rate, it turned out that I would not have to appear in court. A clerk of the court came to see me, armed with a tape recorder to ask me about our married life together. He mainly asked about our sexual relations, or rather lack of them, since my husband became impotent with me. It seemed that our family doctor had already been questioned, so all of the questions were very much to the point. There were a few medical terms that I didn’t understand, but all I had to do was nod.

When he came to the word spasm he used the German word kampf, blushing as he spoke.

Perhaps he had a lascivious imagination; perhaps he imagined me naked and lying under him.

I can’t blame him or our family doctor, because how could they know the real reason for my fear of pregnancy?

Nobody knows… except us, and the alcoholic doctor in Mexico who swindled us out of two thousand dollars… Only we three know about the baby born without bones, the baby we disposed of.

Mad, that’s what it was, to go sightseeing in Mexico in the ninth month of my pregnancy. Why didn’t we go back to Japan instead? Then we would never have fallen into the clutches of that doctor… Then I would not have had to dye my hands with the blood of my infant.

And two weeks after the birth. I had recovered enough for sex. I lay under my husband, in his arms, in a hotel built like a mountain hut by the side of a lake.

We were just reaching our climax… and I went into a spasm. My body gripped his like a vise… he screamed with pain… I was in agony, too. Somehow, I managed to get hold of the phone, locked together as we were.

That boorish fathead of a doctor, looking at the nude yellow couple clasped in the first embrace shown in marital textbooks… just as if we were a pair of copulating monkeys or dogs. Because of the pain, we didn’t feel embarrassed. He injected a depressant, and eventually we were able to separate.

Well, when we got back to Chicago, Dr. John Wells diagnosed the reason for my convulsive spasm. It was, he said, a fear syndrome directed against pregnancy. He said the same thing would happen in the future if I made love to my husband, and that it would happen just as he was about to ejaculate. He said, “It’s like having a nervous pain in your muscle. You’ll get it even if you use contraceptives. You’ll get it with other men, too.” Unless I could overcome my fear of pregnancy. As it was all in English, it was less embarrassing to listen to.

Thus began the agony of the centaur. Does not the head wish to make love to a woman, whilst the lower parts can only cover a mare?

Or we were like the starving figure in Greek mythology, buried up to his neck with plates of delicious food just in front of his nose.

First we would look at each other’s bodies… exchange caresses… at last give up in desperation. Always so fruitlessly tired… always, the stain of our sweat on the sheets, full of the sorrowful smell that symbolized our barren love.

The doctor thought that my fear of childbirth was due to the failure of my first pregnancy—we had put it about that I had had a miscarriage in Mexico—and suggested that all would be well if we changed our environment. But my husband and I, knowing the real cause, knew better. Our future as man and wife had ended in a brick wall.

My husband found a post in Tokyo, and we came back to Japan. We lived apart, except for Saturday nights.

And so, once a week, we would sometimes search for each other’s body in the darkness, dreaming that a miracle might occur. However, after a while, we gave up. My husband told me that when he was with me, he was no longer a complete man.

With a weak smile like an old man’s, he would stroke the thick hair on his chest and say ruefully, “I am impotent. I have lost all interest in women. Sometimes I go to a strip show or look at nudes in magazines, though. That’s about it, I’m afraid.”

And like a fool, I pitied him, still young and handsome, and yet already impotent.

When we first met, he was a melancholic man, but in spite of that he was very quick-witted and seemed to be able easily to make others believe in love between men and women. I remember him well, standing in front of the redbrick university building in Chicago, wearing a red woolen shirt; he struck such a fine pose, his head slightly to one side, that he seemed to match the American scenery around him, and I immediately fell in love with him. I always loved him—the first man I ever knew.

So, one day, when our separation had gone on for six months (and it was my idea originally; I thought that if we were together every night, the torture would be too much), I was overcome by a sudden desire to see him. I got into my Mercedes and set off for Tokyo without ado. All those six hundred kilometers on the road I was in a dream.

It was almost dawn when I got to the Toyo Hotel, where he was staying. It was still winter, and outside it was cold and dark. I parked in front of the hotel and switched off the headlamps. I sat and finished my cigarette, looking at the hotel; later, when it was not too early, I would go in. And then suddenly I saw a familiar figure getting out of a taxi; surely it couldn’t be… but yes, it was my husband.

He paid his fare; his face was expressionless under the lamplight. And somehow, looking at him, I saw about him a dark shadow, suggestive of tiredness after secret lovemaking. Why didn’t I follow him immediately and accost him? I still don’t know.

If only he had come back ten minutes earlier! Or later, when I was more composed and could have approached him; we would have had our customarily meaningless chat; a cup of tea together, and I would have said goodbye.

After all, there’s no contending with fate, I know that. It was fate, wasn’t it, which brought me there at that precise time, to turn out the headlights and find myself in a position just overlooking the entrance to the hotel at the moment that he came back.

I stayed in the car, my coat collar turned up, rubbing my feet together to keep them warm. At that sort of hour, if one has something on one’s mind, you go into a sort of trance without sleeping. I wonder why.

The sun came up, and the first car in the lot had its engine started, clouds of white exhaust filling the icy air. Finally, I could bring myself to move, and I drove back to Osaka without taking any sleep on the way.

That weekend, my husband came back as usual. I greeted him as if nothing had happened, and we spent our usual weekend together. I made no attempt to cross-examine him or catch him out.

For the next two weeks, I resolutely closed my mind to what I had seen and immersed myself in my painting. Even if my husband did have a mistress, I thought, it was my duty to forgive him. But nonetheless I could not resist the temptation, and two weeks later I drove up to Tokyo again.

This time, I arrived in Yokohama about noon and parked my car at a hotel near the seafront, one which usually has a lot of foreign guests. Then I rented an inconspicuous car; I had decided, against the voice of reason, to spy on my husband.

Words are not enough for me to explain the bottomless sense of humiliation and despair that crept over me when I saw the Huntsman’s Log at my husband’s hideout at Yotsuya.

I wish I had never found the key to that apartment in his jacket pocket. I wish I had not had my maid get a spare key made. I wish I had not followed him there…

It would have been much better for me to have known nothing.

It wasn’t all his different women who made me feel that I could not forgive my husband. About those victims I did not particularly care. I could not forgive him because he had listed me as his first victim. And I could not forgive him because he was not afraid to make any of those other women pregnant.

This was how he described what to me was a most precious night, the first night we made love, in the summer holidays:

“It was cramped in the car, but I enjoyed the unnatural posture this forced upon our lovemaking. Her pants off, her skirt pulled up, one leg over the back of the front seat. It made her body tight to enter, which was extra pleasure. Good breasts; she pulled her sweater up, and I did not bother to remove her bra, but pulled it down (though later she took it off herself) and I could see them in the moonlight as I worked on her. Later, she turned over, and asked me to enter her from the back, which I did. Used her mouth on me, too.

“I had invested all my earnings from my part-time job in that old Chevrolet, and this experience made the investment fully worthwhile.

“Keen on foreplay, and definitely not a virgin.”

Was that how he saw our tender and romantic congress? And what did he mean by saying “not a virgin”? I had never known any man before.

A few months later, I read of the suicide of the key-punch operator who was one of the victims described in his diary.

I went to her sister, Tsuneko Obana, at her apartment in Omori. The reason was that I wanted to make sure that my suspicions about the cause of the suicide were correct.

I think it was seeing the mole on her nose that made me decide to plot against my husband. That kind of defect attracts one’s attention, even though one feels sorry for the person who has it. As she spoke, her anger was obvious; those eyes of hers glared through her double eyelids.

“My sister was just a stupid girl. But the man who caused her doom… he wasn’t stupid, and I can never forgive him, never, never.”

How I envied her then; she had such a clear motive for revenge against my husband. I began to wish to change myself into her, to savor the sweetness of revenge.

I had had some cards printed that passed me off as a correspondent for a women’s magazine. She was a simple and straitlaced woman, so it was easy for me to deceive her. I offered her money to write an article on her sister’s death, and I also suggested that with my cooperation she could track down the man responsible.

“Do you really think we could?” She looked at me anxiously as she said this, but I was in no doubt as to her hatred for my husband. So she ended up accepting my offer. Of course, I told her to tell no one about me, because this would get me into trouble with my magazine, particularly if some other magazine got wind of our project and stole it.

Based on the diary of her sister, I suggested that she go to the bar Boi and trace the man who had sung with her. Everything went without a hitch; it all seemed too easy. She trusted me completely and did exactly what I said. Everything she found out she wrote down and gave to me.

But still I was not satisfied. Indeed, the more our plan succeeded, the more irritated I became. I was getting jealous of this woman; somehow, her activities seemed to create a relationship between her and my husband. Of course, really I was at this time beginning to think abnormally. Jealousy is a powerful thing. And my lust for sex is so strong.

So gradually, deep down inside myself, I began to wish that I could become Tsuneko Obana and partake of her longing for revenge against my husband.

And the semen. That was a good idea of mine, I think. You may say that it only amounted to circumstantial evidence, but think of it this way. If, by any chance, my husband was able to clear himself despite my efforts, at least the police would not turn their attention toward me or Tsuneko Obana, for how could women produce semen?

And when I started to collect semen from those men, it became central to the meaning of my life. Women, after all, are creatures who take semen from men… and my husband would give me none. So it was poetic justice, in a way… I was punishing my husband for not giving me the semen that is a woman’s right…

But was I really punishing my husband; was that all? Maybe it was just an excuse to collect semen.

And the blood. Leaving blood of my husband’s group under the nails of my victims—that was clever, wasn’t it?

Well, my urges became stronger and stronger, and so did my jealousy of Tsuneko Obana. I led her on, used her as a puppet; she did everything I wanted, but even that did not give me full pleasure. I sent her to A.M.U. to check the blood type, which of course I knew perfectly well all along. I got her to phone the Toyo Hotel with an assumed voice. Poor cat’s-paw; she thought she was discovering things, which were perfectly well known to me all along. And just in case anyone ever checked up, it would be the woman with the mole that they would hunt.

But her usefulness was past. Now I must take the law into my own hands, and she could prove an obstacle. She knew too much. So I suggested that she should move out of her apartment and take another in her sister’s name. She had to vanish for good; I had to become Tsuneko Obana, and then I would acquire the fullest motive for revenge upon my husband.

Dr. John Wells would have attributed my lust for revenge against my husband to repressed sexual desire, I suppose. Those psychiatrists have one-track minds…

I set my trap with the semen I took from those men and the Rh-negative blood I stole from the cosmetics salesman in the inn, whom I chloroformed first. I also used chloroform on my victims so that they did not resist when I strangled them.

The woman in Kinshicho. She was just a sort of hors d’oeuvre to begin the process of terror on my husband. So there was no need to leave blood under her fingernails.

In the case of Fusako Aikawa in Koenji, I chloroformed my husband as he lay sleeping at my side and took his blood. I was worried about that blood, because it coagulated in the test tube on the way to Tokyo, even though I had packed it in dry ice. Would it fool them? I could but try.

Well, I went to visit Fusako Aikawa, but before I could make my escape, my husband turned up! I hid in the closet until he left, but my heart was freezing with terror. However, it was all right in the end, but I had to make a quick getaway just in case he called the police.

As for Mitsuko Kosugi, she was in my pay all along. She didn’t mind kissing my husband at Tokyo Tower, prudish little girl that she was, because she knew that I was watching. I had to confront my husband, invisibly, as it were, to terrify him the more. Did it work, I wonder? But I doubt if she ever had sex with him; she wasn’t the type. She had to die anyhow, poor girl.

The trick with the blade in the wardrobe; now that was neat. It drew blood, just as I intended, though I thought there was no better than a one-in-ten chance. Frankly, when I saw how well it worked, I was a bit scared. Was there not some other invisible hand moving me in my pursuit of revenge?

All that I did thus became a sort of ceremony, one that I had to perform regardless of whether it worked or not. Killing three or four people thus became nothing to me; my psychology knew no limitation.

So much for Dr. John Wells and his comfortable theories. He can forget his statistics, forget about suppressed sexual drives. What do people like him know?

My husband’s hunting days were limited to Tuesdays and Thursdays, I found.

After the first time, it was easy. I, a passive woman who normally trembles with fear at the slightest thing, drew closer and closer to my victims.

Why am I writing this? I began to want to do it when I heard that my husband had been sentenced to death.

That woman student I hired—she did her job well. She set up her canvas at the museum to lure my husband as I suggested, and it worked. At Tokyo Tower, she was my decoy; she knew that I was watching from the shadows and was not afraid to kiss him. She summoned him to her room late at night; she was not afraid, for I told her that I would be there.

She had to die, poor, blameless thing. At the very least my husband deserves to die for the murder of that innocent woman. For husband and wife are one, are they not? So it really doesn’t matter if he, my better half, goes to the gallows in my place.

Today, my father phoned to say that the bed in the hospital is now ready for me. By tomorrow, I’ll be in the hospital. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow… all those mornings, I will awake in a hospital bed. It’s my destiny.

And some day, perhaps when I am long gone, this atelier will be torn down. They will rip up the concrete foundations, and what will they find? Human bones; no more, I daresay. And certainly the mole will have vanished in the decomposition. Nothing to identify Tsuneko Obana by. Unless science has made progress by then; perhaps they will detect the aftermath of a mole. Tsuneko Obana. I had to do it. I had to become her.

But all that is in the future.

Today, I know that I am going farther and farther away from myself, drawn by those invisible powers that have controlled me more and more of late. Those sounds in my head—how I wish they would go away! Perhaps they can do something about it in the hospital. If a policeman came to question me today, I know that I could give him no answer.

And talking of the future, what does it hold in store for me? Today I am all skin and bones, but in ten or twenty years’ time it will be different. I shall be a fat nymphomaniac lying in a hospital bed, eating chocolates or my own excretur—what does it matter? In the corner of the psychiatric ward, I will be known as the woman who winds her drawstring around the bedstead and pulls with all her might.

Nearly 4 p.m. Time for me to become Tsuneko Obana again.

I get my makeup box. With skill I fix my eyes; there, nobody will recognize my face now! Carefully I brush black ink onto the base of my nose.

Inside my head, as persistent as a sutra, I hear Tsuneko Obana’s monologue:

“Silly, silly little girl. Don’t say you cried in his arms; don’t tell me that you were crushed under his body…”

Shinji closed the notebook and gazed at the old man, who was impassively smoking his cigar.

“It will take time, of course,” Hatanaka said, “but that should be enough.”

“But can you use it? Your promise…”

“From which I regard myself as being released. That old housekeeper hanged herself after we left. I half expected it; do you remember what she said? ‘My duty is now complete.’ Well, that feudal type, you know it can only mean one thing. A pity not more Japanese are like her nowadays.”

“And you did not try to stop her?”

“Ah well, you are so young, you see. You modern people; I wonder if in time you will become real Japanese again! No. To frustrate the loyalty of a retainer is a sin for which one should burn in hell! She wrote a note to me, however: ‘Everything is now in your hands.’

“And the wife is now in a mental home, of course. Non compos mentis—and this notebook proves it. They can never bring her to trial—if they try, I will take great pleasure in defending her. They doubt if she will ever recover her physical strength, too.”

The old man blew a smoke ring, and suddenly Shinji was reconciled to the grinding routines of the law. To work for such a man, and someday, perhaps, to become like him…

It was at the end of October that Ichiro Honda was finally released from prison. He gazed appreciatively at the autumn tints and breathed deeply of the chill wind that blew against the gray stones of the court building that he had put behind him.